The Best (and Worst!) Christmas Music

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and with just under two weeks until the Jolly Old Elf arrives, it's really beginning to sound like it, too.

It's at this point in the year that I really begin to enjoy Christmas music (for the most part, anyway), and love hearing the strains of "O Holy Night" or Bono belting out "well, tonight thank God it's them, instead of you" from my iPod or the all-Christmas station several times a day.

As it is every Christmas season, there are a few songs I've already heard one time too many, some that seem to be on the low-rotation list, and a couple I will never hear unless I download them myself.

For all its festive fa-la-la-la-la, Christmas music can be divisive. Either you love the Glee cast singing covers of Christmas songs, or (like me) you don't. Touching Christmas songs are fine. Songs about mothers dying on Christmas Eve are just plain wrong. So are unnecessary remakes of songs (Whitney Houston's "Do You Hear What I Hear?" is lovely. Band Aid remakes and covers are not.). Sorry, Sirs Elton and Paul: Your Christmas songs aren't going to make your Greatest Hits compilations. I've seen countless blog posts and heard pundits wading into the fray with the best and worst Christmas songs of all time.

So in that spirit, here's the go-to playlist for a Pellegrini Christmas:

The Classics
I'd have a hard time saying anything bad about the traditional Christmas carols. "Joy to the World", "Away in a Manger", "Silent Night", "O Come All Ye Faithful" -- anything in that category gets cranked up loud when it comes on the radio. Depending (of course) upon who sings it.

Then there are the "old" Christmas songs; you know, the ones your parents and grandparents hum while they wrap presents and bake shortbread. After all, who can resist Ol' Blue Eyes crooning "Santa Claus is Coming to Town"?

But it's Bing Crosby who set the bar for Christmas classics. Whose heart doesn't melt just a little bit when "I'll Be Home for Christmas" comes on the radio? It's a wartime song, and we all know he isn't going to make it back.

Then, after years of being kind of relegated to the Old Boys Club, Bing re-invented himself in 1977. He paired up with a strange-looking English fella, and recorded an all-new version of "The Little Drummer Boy". While he pa-rum-pa-pum-pumed, David Bowie sang about hoping for peace on Earth. Strange fact: Bowie was a youthful 30 when that song was recorded on September 11, 1977, two years older than the song itself. Bing Crosby was 74 and died just a month later, on October 14. And today, Bowie's only eight years younger than Bing was back in 1977.

Modern Classics
Oh, it's a long, loooong list of songs. At the top, it has to be "Fairytale of New York", by The Pogues. Whether it's the unlikely musical pairing of Shane MacGowan with the late Kirsty McColl, the achingly beautiful lyrics of love and loss, optimism and despair, or the swelling sound of the string arrangement at the end, it's the one song I could listen to all day and still be as moved the last time I hear it as the first.

Next up: Band Aid's "Do They Know it's Christmas?". Well, of course they didn't. After all, this was 1984. But it's the song that launched a dozen other relief efforts. I turned 17 that December, and "Do They Know it's Christmas?" was the awakening of my social conscience. Whenever I hear that song, I can see the video in my mind's eye. So I guess it's a bit like my generation's "White Christmas".